Angola changed the provincial boundaries more than one year ago and no one has updated them. I wouldn’t mind handling this, since I had a shapefile of the new boundaries, but the provinces are huge and the current boundaries are tied to rivers and other things in relations. What’s the procedure here?
Import/Guidelines - OpenStreetMap Wiki - for start, what is the license of this new data? are we allowed to use it?
The source is this ArcGIS . And I think we can use it. In any case, it was created following the detailed official border descriptions. We can just follow those as well. For Moxico, for example, the new border just follows a river for the most part. But I don’t know how to do it in a way that is not manual.
Sorry, but I’ve got to say much the same as I did yesterday regarding your other work.
What licence is the data distributed under & are we able to use it? The arcgis page says
“Terms of use
No special restrictions or limitations on using the item’s content have been provided.”, which doesn’t tell us anything? It “may” be OK?, but we have to be 100% certain, otherwise it leaves OSM open to possible legal action over breach of copyright
It also shows the owner as “kuyengap_msugis”, which seems like it could be a personal name, not an official Angolan government department? Are they authorised to distribute this information?
Again, if you want to import this information into OSM, you first need to work through the Import Guidelines: Import/Guidelines - OpenStreetMap Wiki
I don’t wish to discourage you, but I strongly urge you to get a lot more experience at basic OSM mapping before you decide to start attempting massive imports!
Graeme Fitzpatrick
Moderator
OSMF Data Working Group
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But, in this case, I wouldn’t be uploading lots of items. I just want to update the boundaries of a couple provinces. I don’t even need to to use the import feature. I just want to know if there’s an easy way to change the current relations. This would all be pretty simple, if they weren’t so large.
This is the problem!
The areas involved are massive so you will be dealing with 000s (possibly 0000s?) of points being changed.
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If you’re using data from another source, it must be under a compatible license regardless of how you add it into OSM. If that dataset isn’t under a compatible license, you cannot use it.
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That would be best. I suppose you can find those in some publicly accessible legal publication?
Then it’s a manual work to update existing relations along new borders. Or delete the old ones if they have nothing in common with the new ones.
It would be great to “save” the previous state in OHM.
Quite a big project. You can try and contact the original mappers of the current boundary relations and ask them for help.
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Agree with you that this should not be a delete-old-and-upload-new job. Ideally that job will preserve and reuse existing data, so that the change can be seen within OSM history.
I like as well the idea to migrate existing boundaries to OHM prior to the change.
Something to watch out for: while the law setting the new provincial boundaries (and increasing the number of provinces from 18 to 21) came into effect in September 2024, it is not clear that the changes have been implemented yet. Eg. https://governo.gov.ao/angola/mapa - which I would think is as official as official can be - still shows the old 18 provinces, despite the stated goal of implementation some time in 2025. In keeping with OSM’s ‘map the reality on the ground’ goal, it might be too soon to change the boundaries in OSM.
The census results, which were released two weeks ago, already use the new boundaries.